Five Things – 18-03-17

Last week I shared Jeff Speck’s talk about why cities should be more walkable. In this talk he explores the how, rather than the why of the last talk. This is a really interesting look at how to make overall small changes to a city to encourage it to be more walkable, and thus more enjoyable by the people who live in it.

If you feel like the days are getting longer, you’re actually correct. Apparently this is usually fixed on electronic clocks by adding a second every now and again, however this is staring to cause issues.

It’s an interesting fight between the traditionalists, and the electronic systems people (and the UK’s possessiveness of being Greenwich being the setter of all clocks).

This podcast is quickly becoming one of my favourites, since it’s on a topic I rarely thought about before: the global shipping industry. This episode explores the day to day workings of a port, and previous episodes gave the history of the shipping industry and how the introduction of the container changed everything!

This podcast is a limited 8 episode series, so if you haven’t got into podcasts previously, this might be a great place to start. Alexis Madrigal has managed to bring a 99% Invisible style look into an area that everyone in the western world benefits from, yet don’t know anything about.

If this ends up being shown by studies, it honestly wouldn’t be that surprising as David Greenfield says in the article: “People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump.” It has been shown that computers and smartphones, can trigger doses of dopamine to be released (The Guardian, 18 minute read), this is especially true when playing games or using social media.

An interesting look into the problem of scientific fraud, especially around psychological research. Chris Hartgerink has created a program that scans papers for statistical errors in papers and flags them to be checked.

This is a great solution, especially as it’s often very hard to detect fraud and mistakes in scientific research as authors don’t need to supply all their data to the public, only to the people reviewing the work. I think this will lead to more accurate papers, and will help increase trust in science.